ABSTRACT
More and more online businesses are using the email for a purpose
other than its original one, which was to enable communication
between people. Email address is used as a user account identifier
and systems send transactional messages to their user’s email
addresses. This paper presents an analysis of the user’s account
registration process in the main online businesses used by Brazilian
people in 2018. It has been found that the exclusive use of email
as account identifier is the most used option and that the great
majority does not verify if the email informed during the registration
process really belongs to the requesting user. Along with the
findings discussion, we outline some measures that could be used
by these businesses to reduce the negative impact to users privacy.